The Vice-Chamberlain of the Household reported to the House, on behalf of the Prime Minister, that the address of 22 June 2009 to Her Majesty, praying Her Majesty that she will be most graciously pleased to confer some signal mark of her royal favour upon the right hon. Michael J. Martin for his eminent services during the period in which he has, with such distinguished ability and dignity presided in the Chair of this House, has been presented to Her Majesty, and Her Majesty has been pleased to receive the same very graciously, and has commanded me to acquaint this House that Her Majesty is desirous, in compliance with the request of her faithful Commons, to confer upon the right hon. Michael J. Martin some signal mark of her royal favour.

David Davies: What would the Secretary of State say to a constituent of mine who wanted to renew his forklift truck driver's licence, which could have got him a job, and was told that, despite his being out of work for six months, he was not eligible to have the costs refunded or to have any training not because he was not entitled to it, but because he lived in the wrong area? Why is there a postcode lottery when it comes to giving training to people who want to find work?

Jim Knight: I can certainly give my hon. Friend that reassurance. In my new role I will be working closely with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Communities and Local Government. One of the things that I am particularly keen to pursue are the opportunities created by bringing together skills and business in a single Department so that we can ensure we are keeping pace with the sort of changes that my hon. Friend mentions, and linking them into the employment work that we do in the Department for Work and Pensions.

David Cameron: At least they can read and take dictation. For example, the Government are saying, "If you don't take the job, you won't get the benefits." We announced that at our party conference two years ago. Every year, the Prime Minister says that we do not have any policies, yet every year he fills his draft legislative programme with them.
	Much of the rest of the programme has been rehashed from previous years. The simplification of our immigration rules, for example, was announced in last year's programme. The floods Bill was recommended in 2007, announced in 2008 and re-announced again this morning, in 2009. One-to-one tuition and the NHS check-ups were both announced last year—[Hon. Members: "We are doing that."] Well, you should be doing it by now.
	The Constitutional Renewal Bill is now back for the third time in a row. This time, it is apparently going to include Lords reform—but the Prime Minister has not been reforming the House of Lords; he has been stuffing it with his cronies. I stuffed it with one of his cronies, too; he is on our side now. Is not the real renewal that our country needs not a Bill but a general election?
	Where is the Heritage Protection Bill that was announced last year? Where are the regulatory budgets that the Prime Minister announced as a way of cutting red tape on business? We have heard not a word about the legislation on the Royal Mail. That was to be the great virility test for the Prime Minister's reforming zeal—remember? Where is it? Stuck in the post? We were promised a Second Reading before the summer recess. Where is it? Lord Mandelson said in today's  Financial Times that he was finding himself "jostled" out of the programme. I cannot believe that Lord Mandelson of upgrade has ever been jostled out of anything, but there we are.
	Let me make the Prime Minister an offer. If he has not got time in his packed parliamentary schedule to get his Royal Mail reforms through, would he like to use the time allocated for our Opposition day debate next week for the Bill's Second Reading? Would he welcome that? Just nod— [ Interruption. ] Is there anybody out there? Is there anybody in there? So much for all his talk about tough decisions: he has bottled it once again.
	The Prime Minister claims that there are three themes in his statement: the economy, public services and political reform. Let me ask him a couple of questions about each. First, on the economy, he talks about what he is doing for the unemployed. Will he confirm that the number of young people who are not in employment or training was higher than a decade ago even before the recession began, and that there are now 1 million of our fellow citizens in that situation? On banking, do we not need to recognise that the whole system has failed? That is why we are planning to end the whole tripartite system, to give new powers to the Bank of England and to let the Bank call time on debt. Is not what we have got from the Government just tinkering with a system that does not work, from a Prime Minister who set it up and cannot afford to admit that he got it wrong?
	On public finances, when will the Prime Minister address the fact that Britain is heading for the worst budget deficit in the developed world? To listen to his statement, one would think that the Treasury were rolling in money. When is someone going to tell him that it has run out? Let me read out what the OECD said only this morning. It said that the Government had to be more "ambitious" and more "explicit" about the need for spending cuts. The OECD is joining a growing list—from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to the Governor of the Bank of England, and, in private, half the Cabinet—of those who admit that he has got to be straight with people on spending. So let me ask the Prime Minister a very simple question: will there be a spending review before the general election? This morning, the First Secretary said that there would not, then the Treasury said that there might be. Who speaks for the Government? Any household or company faced with that level of debt would start to get it under control. Is it not essential to start reviewing spending now?
	If the first big failure of today's announcement is the lack of honesty on spending, the second is surely the lack of real reform in our public services. I suppose, however, that we should be grateful for one thing: year after year, this Government and this Prime Minister have promoted and defended their targets culture; today, they have finally admitted that they were wrong all along. But let us make no mistake: the proposals are about top-down, bureaucratic tinkering, not real reform.
	On schools, the Prime Minister talks about putting power in parents' hands, so why is he replacing the raw data of school league tables with manufactured report cards? On the police, why is the Prime Minister just talking about empowering citizens, rather than giving them the chance to vote for their elected representatives? On health, why is he restricting people's choices rather than letting them and their GPs choose where they get treated?
	Then there is the addiction to the initiative. Let us take just one—the parenting order. It is apparently the big, new idea on school discipline, but it was actually announced in September 2004. In the past five years, how many pupils have been disciplined in that way? A big fat zero. That is the truth behind the Government's announcement. The truth about today's statement is that it serves only to highlight the decline of this Government. Their money has run out, their political capital is running out, and now their time is running out.
	Will the Prime Minister answer two specific questions? First, will there be a comprehensive spending review? Secondly, will he bring forward the legislation on the Royal Mail before the summer recess?
	What we have seen today is yet another re-launch—a re-launch without a price tag. Is it not clear to the whole country that the only way to sort out our finances, to get real reform of our public services, and to build Britain's future, is to change this wretched Government?

Nicholas Clegg: The Prime Minister and the leader of the Conservatives have just perfected their fake debate on public spending, yet both are treating voters as if they are children, too young to know the truth. This morning, the Government have reneged on their promise to hold a comprehensive spending review before the next election, and the Conservatives are not going to decide on their cuts until the day after it. Neither is willing to come clean on the difficult long-term savings we will need to make to balance the nation's books. It is like a big hoax—they trade insults and numbers, but hide the truth.
	There are some announcements—or, rather, re-announcements—that I welcome, not least the ongoing consultation to give local authorities control over housing rents and revenues, the proposals for an elected House of Lords and the commitment to give all young people under 25 a guaranteed job or training place. As ever, however, the devil will be in the detail. This is the 11th announcement on housing since September. The Government's consultation on housing revenue has been grinding on since January, yet 1.8 million people are still waiting for a decent home.
	We have been debating reform of the House of Lords—the other place—for more than a century, so now is the time for action, not simply more proposals. The Prime Minister is still silent on some of the wider more radical political reforms we need to clean up British politics once and for all. The hopes of young people to avoid the scrapheap of long-term unemployment must not be dashed in practice once again.
	In the drum roll of advance media leaks, we were promised a vision of the future from the Government based on decentralisation and personal entitlements. I welcome any recognition from a party and a Government of arch centralisers that they have got it wrong and that the levers of Whitehall do not provide all the answers. Yet many of the so-called personal entitlements are, on closer inspection, just the recycled versions of the old targets. Suddenly, the target to receive an operation within 18 weeks of seeing a GP is called an entitlement. Last week, the Prime Minister called the cuts an investment; this week, he is calling a target an entitlement, so can he tell us exactly what is the difference?
	When one scratches beneath the rhetoric, the long screwdriver of Whitehall is still in place, because the Prime Minister, the great godfather of big government still cannot really let go. Even as we speak, his Government are giving his Education Secretary—where is he? He is not here—153 new powers in the Apprenticeship, Skills and Learning Bill, including the power to hand-pick children's school books. Is that what he calls "giving power away"? If the Prime Minister really wanted to make sure investment followed individuals, he would have announced a school funding premium tied directly to the most disadvantaged pupils so that they can get the personalised support and tuition that they need on their terms.
	Given the likelihood that many of the Prime Minister's proposals will not make it off the pages of the Government's press release and are unlikely to work in practice, does he agree with a senior Government official quoted in today's  Financial Times who admitted that this Government have
	"a fixation on producing endless policy documents—a total lack of interest in delivery"?
	All in all, the Prime Minister's statement was a hotch-potch of unrelated Whitehall schemes—a ministerial cut-and-paste job scraped together by a Government without a unifying vision and a Prime Minister running out of steam.

Gordon Brown: The right hon. Gentleman recognises, as we do, that employment is a huge issue. The question is, does he support our proposals or not? We have presented specific proposals for unemployed young people, for adults who need help and for school leavers this summer. The proposals are very precise, and they will give help to people in different communities of this country. The hon. Gentleman could not tell us whether he supported them or not, but I feel that this is the right way forward, and I hope that on reflection he too will consider that those are the right things to do.
	In the case of the health service and education, it is right that individuals should now have personal entitlements. We could not have achieved the 18-week maximum wait for hospitals without the investment that we have made and the targets that we have set. It is right that individuals can now be sure that they will have that entitlement when they go to their hospitals wanting health service treatment. It is equally right that parents who need tutoring help for their children who are unable to read or unable to write, or are finding it difficult to count, should receive it when we can give it to them. The hon. Gentleman should support that.
	As for the House of Lords, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will now support our proposals for change.

Liz Blackman: One group of children crying out for more personalised education are those with high-functioning autism, who are often misunderstood. Crucial to their support would be better training for staff, classroom assistants and others. Will he assure me that attention will be paid to that?

Gordon Brown: We have introduced a points system to deal with some of the problems that have arisen in the past from immigration. The points system is now in operation and it is working. I ask him to look at the points system and to know that it is working well.

Stuart Bell: The House clearly welcomes the Prime Minister's proposals to put £500 million into housing, thus making it £2.1 billion of additional investment in two years and resulting in the building of 110,000 homes and the creating of 45,000 jobs. How does that contrast with a policy of cutting investment in a recession and putting 500,000 on the dole queue?

Julian Lewis: In one of 46 press reports in the past two days that have trailed the contents of this statement, the  Financial Times said:
	"Some of the fine details have been held back"—
	from the press, following
	"the new Speaker's demands for an end to pre-briefing of policy changes in the media."
	Does the Prime Minister seriously believe that the new Speaker will be content with such marginal concessions?

Bob Russell: Prime Minister, in the real world, on Friday, this Government shelved 180 major capital building programmes in the college sector, as the front page of today's  Colchester Gazette reports. If the Prime Minister wants to be taken seriously about building for the future for Britain, will he reinstate those shelved building programmes so that our young people may have decent places to study and unemployed building workers can be put back to work?

Alistair Carmichael: I do not take issue with the creation of offences per se, but does the Secretary of State accept that these offences and the processes that stem from them must be compliant with article 6 of the European convention on human rights. Having regard to the terms of the Bill before us, can the right hon. Gentleman honestly say that they are?

Jack Straw: That is our judgment. My right hon. and learned friend the Leader of the House would not have signed the section 19 certificate, which she has, if she had not taken that view.

Jack Straw: No. I am going to end my speech in a moment.
	Clause 10 states:
	"No enactment or rule of law which prevents proceedings in Parliament being impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament is to prevent—
	(a) the IPSA from carrying out any of its functions;
	(b) the Commissioner from carrying out any of the Commissioner's functions;
	(c) any evidence from being admissible in proceedings against a member... for an offence under section 9."
	That directly excludes the operation of article IX of the Bill of Rights from the functions of IPSA and the commissioner, and ensures that evidence relating to an offence under clause 9—not anything else—is admissible in court.
	Our draftsmen tried to draft the clause in a narrow way. I understand and appreciate the concerns expressed by the learned Clerk, but our view, building on the recommendations of the 2003 Joint Committee on the draft Corruption Bill and further discussions that I have had on the latest Bribery Bill—which contains a similar exclusion in respect of article IX—is that such an exclusion is acceptable. However, I understand the sensitivity of the issue, and I promise that I will listen carefully to the concerns that are expressed.

Patrick Cormack: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, and we owe his Committee a real debt of gratitude, but what he has just said again underlines the absurdity of our proceedings. He and his fellow members cannot be present because they are listening to material evidence that is concerned with the very issues that we are discussing. The Justice Secretary and Lord High Chancellor is a reasonable man, so can he not just take that point on board?

Jack Straw: I accept the compliment from the hon. Gentleman and thank him very much. At the time that the Justice Committee will be receiving evidence from the Clerk, we will be debating the lower-numbered clauses—clauses 1 to 5—and as far as I recall, they have raised no issues for the Clerk.

Patrick Cormack: I am starting to run out of time, so I simply respond by saying that that does not invalidate the proposition that I have made. It is all germane to this Bill and we should have a chance to reflect on what the Clerk says. However the Clerk produced this paper, I have never before seen anything like it circulated so widely beyond the Committee that commissioned or asked for it, and it makes some extraordinarily important points.
	Thank goodness the Secretary of State has at least listened to the Clerk's strictures on clause 6; we are grateful for that. Clause 8 is also significant, and the Clerk states that
	"if the Committee declined to act on a recommendation, that could presumably become the basis of legal proceedings in which the Commissioner (or anyone else) sought to require the Committee to comply."
	That section is important, and my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire has already quoted what the Clerk said about clause 10:
	"This could have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech of Members and of witnesses before committees and would hamper the ability of House officials to give advice to Members."
	I have already referred to the Clerk's comments on our Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which have not been tagged for this afternoon's debate but, frankly, should have been because they are highly relevant.
	I end where I was not going to end, but I am tempted to do so by the perceptive, thoughtful and, frankly, very compelling speech of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, who talked about the implications of clause 5(8), which deals with outside interests. Those of us who have some outside interests have been put in a position recently whereby we are almost ashamed to talk of them. Well, I am not. I think it important that one should sometimes share these things with colleagues in the House, and I am tempted to do so by the frank way—no pun intended—in which the right hon. Member for Birkenhead shared his experiences.
	For many years, I have been involved in helping to run an annual reward for responsible capitalism. It must be thought to be a good thing, as the first award was presented by the current Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years ago, it was presented by the present Chancellor and last year by the Foreign Secretary. It is a highly respectable and, I think, a good thing; the chairman of our judges is the former Lord Chief Justice, who succeeded the late great Lord Dahrendorf, who sadly died just a couple of weeks ago. I believe that this is immensely worthwhile and I think it good that Members of Parliament should be involved in it. I am proud to be involved with it. Where does my parliamentary interest begin and end? It is very similar to what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead said about his egg timer in his conversation this morning.
	It would be very sad indeed if the regulations that we pass and are supervised by this new body were so interpreted and applied that Parliament became an assembly of nerds, anoraks and the very rich. That would be an extremely bad development for Parliament. It is important that we have people who have interests outside—relevant interests, interests that help to inform their contributions to debate.
	We are all answerable to our constituents for the time we spend on our parliamentary work and in our constituency. I do not think anyone would ever suggest that I was less than a "full-time Member of Parliament" or a "full-time constituency Member", and yet I find a little time to do other things, and I believe that it helps me—and, I hope, indirectly—helps my constituents and the House. It is most important that we recognise this and that any body set up to look after our interests recognises it, too. I hope that the Kelly committee will recognise it.
	Above all, I hope that the Government—or, if not this Government, a future Government—will put aside the oppressive parts of the Bill before us today. To have parliamentarians in a free country answerable in any way to an appointed quango is to diminish Parliament and to diminish those who sit in Parliament and to deter people from coming into Parliament in the future. What we want is an institution that truly attracts the best, and not just the best from the young but from those of all ages. A parliamentary intake that includes men and women in their 50s and 60s, as did the 1970 intake when I first entered Parliament, is all the better for that. It should not be composed only of those who come here motivated by the ambition to carry a Dispatch Box and be driven in a ministerial car—it is good that some should do so—as there is no higher calling than representing a part of the United Kingdom in this place. I fear that the Bill militates against that.
	I thus beg the Secretary of State and Lord High Chancellor—both of them!—to recognise what has reasonably been said about the amount of time that Ministers have to spend, quite properly, on their duties, but to concentrate too on the financial part of the Bill and have it ready for Kelly so that his committee can indeed supervise and implement. Most of all, however, I beg the right hon. Gentleman to shy away from the establishment of an organisation that can in any way seek to dictate either directly or indirectly to the elected representatives of the people of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled.

Natascha Engel: I do not entirely agree with that. The motivation behind introducing the Bill is to address the problems that have been very well documented and to say to the people outside this Chamber, "We understand and agree with your outrage, and we are doing something about it." On the timing, I do not think hat there is any mad rush. We do not need to have something on the statute book within a week. We want to take responsibility and accept the consequences of what we have done, but agree that we need to sort this out for the next generation. Regardless of whether they have made a claim, every incumbent MP is tainted by this expenses scandal. We need to make sure that, as far as possible, the next Parliament can start afresh.
	Democracy is a messy business and Parliament is messy, and there is no system that is not open to abuse in some way—and there are some very creative people in Parliament. However, we need to accept collective responsibility for what we have done, and say to the next generation, "The systems that put the checks and balances on Parliament are as good as we can make them." Therefore, I do not think there is any mad hurry, and that instead we need to do things in sequence.
	The Sir Christopher Kelly committee should be given the time to interview as many people and to take as many submissions as it wants, and to go out and talk to members of the public and ask them what they want, and take some submissions from them. I do not know how many members of the public made a submission to the Kelly committee, but I would like to know. I suspect that a lot of parliamentarians made submissions to it, however. All of this is about saying, "This is the sequence in which we are doing this job. This is the right way to do it." We should not push forward in an unseemly hurry just to make it look like we are doing something. We have done that time and again before, and every single time we have really messed it up.

Alan Beith: My intervention in this debate as Chairman of the Justice Committee follows contributions from the Chairmen of the Standards and Privileges Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and all three Committees have serious concerns about aspects of this Bill. If that, combined with speeches such as that which we have just heard, does not make the Government realise that they have got to rethink substantial parts of it and step back from this great rush, I do not know what will.
	It was the Justice Committee that sought the memorandum from the Clerk of the House that has been at the centre of the debate, and we will take evidence from him and others tomorrow at 5 o'clock. As the Lord Chancellor has pointed out, the programme motion defers some of the relevant clauses until Wednesday and we intend to see that Tuesday's oral evidence is printed overnight so that it will be in the hands of Members on Wednesday, but that is still not a satisfactory way of dealing with a matter of this kind.
	I welcome the transfer of responsibilities for allowances and pay effectively to what is at this stage a combination of this new body, the Senior Salaries Review Body and the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We need to put that work outside Parliament—to contract it to somebody else—as it should not be done by us. The new body needs to be a more effective paying and withholding body for pay and allowances. I say "withholding" because I do not regard the refusal to pay an allowance as a disciplinary measure. I think that is the proper application of a scheme of allowances and expenses. The role I see for the body set up under the Bill is to operate the scheme, to pay allowances when it considers they have been appropriately claimed within the rules and not to do so otherwise, and to be in a position to be entirely firm about how it handles such matters, which has not always seemed possible for the Fees Office in the past, and has led to this very unsatisfactory situation.
	Protection, however, needs to remain around the rights of Parliament. That protection is underpinned in one respect in the Bill by the recognition that Parliament should take any disciplinary processes that arise from things going wrong in the system once the existence of a possible disciplinary offence has been identified. I am glad that principle is recognised, as it is a very important one, but that does not solve the problems. The inclusion of new criminal offences has raised the problem of double jeopardy, which needs to be considered seriously, and several aspects of the drafting impinge on rights in the European convention on human rights, as the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights has explained. Several clauses appear to infringe the principle that Parliament and the courts do not call into question each other's decisions, as stated in article 9 of the Bill of Rights.
	I want to turn to the constitutional areas that the Clerk identified in his evidence to us. Happily, I can dispense with what I was going to say about clause 6 because of the Government's welcome decision not to proceed with it. Clause 7 raises questions, however. As the Clerk says, for example:
	"If the House were to punish for a failure in respect of a requirement which was found by a court to have been unreasonable"—
	a Member might have taken the matter to court, the court might have found the initial reference to be unreasonable and Parliament might have then taken action on it—we would be a short step from
	"review by the court of the exercise of disciplinary powers by the House."
	Even clause 7 presents a problem.

Alan Beith: The unease among the general public is more than unease—it is anger, and a very real anger. It is not successfully addressed if what we do in the end is to create a process that undermines the rights of the public in other ways in the future without addressing that grievance. Rushing into legislation that would have the effects that I described earlier does not deal with the public anger. The setting up of an independent body to determine what pay and allowances we should receive and to police the paying of them and the claiming of them goes some way to addressing that anger, and I welcome that. The House must ensure that it deals appropriately and effectively with those who break its rules, but it should not in the process take away the rights of our constituents. If it is going even to contemplate doing so, it should give the matter serious consideration.
	At the end of the day, there is what I like to think of as a sort of Bradlaugh principle at stake here. The ultimate judge must be the electorate. Bradlaugh found that his colleagues in Parliament repeatedly refused to accept his insistence that a rule of the House was an unfair constraint on him—in his case, the rule requiring him to swear an oath that he as an atheist did not believe it right to swear. If a Member, like him, found that his colleagues in the House were unwilling to accept him as a Member on those terms, ultimately it would be the electorate who must be allowed to judge and to insist on sending him back to Parliament, saying, "We wish this man to represent us, notwithstanding the fact that he appears to have broken a rule that others find important." That is a pretty fundamental principle. Of course, it is not an easy principle even for the Member affected, who might have to fight or even finance an election without the support of his political party, under procedures that we have seen operating in recent weeks in this House. However, it is the ultimate protection and the ultimate principle.
	Before we get to that point, there must be proper due process as far as any person—in this case, a Member of the House of Commons who is accused of behaving improperly—is concerned. The processes that we create should not also, in themselves, take away protections that are designed to ensure that people can give evidence to Committees of this House without fear of a penalty for doing so and without fear that the evidence they give can be adduced in court in circumstances that they did not envisage.
	The Government have been presented with a very strong case today. First, they should get ahead with the creation of a body that can administer pay and allowances and, secondly, they should not rush into things that would undermine some of the most basic freedoms, which go back to the Bill of Rights.

Adam Afriyie: I would not necessarily go that far, but we need to set a debate such as this in context. As the hon. Lady pointed out, our constituents do not understand quite what we do. I do not blame them. For the first few years that we are here, we do not understand exactly all the responsibilities either. To inform decision making on remuneration or considerations, one must take into account what is expected of a Member of Parliament.
	When it comes to second jobs or declaring outside income and the amount of time spent on outside interests, that can be misconstrued if being a Member of Parliament is seen as a full-time, nine-to-five job, which is not the situation. In many ways we are self-employed small business owners. We run our own offices and employ our own staff. In some ways we are paid employees for the functions that we perform in the House. In some cases we are unpaid employees, when we work, many of us, more than 60 or 70 hours a week. It is a vocation. We are trainees—novices—when we first arrive. We are part-time employees because we have long recesses, apparently. We have duties within working hours and outside working hours.
	This is not a clearly defined job that implies that there should be a salary. There were allowances from the 1300s to the 1700s, and they were reintroduced in 1911 by Lloyd George. He said:
	"When we offer £400 a year as payment of Members of Parliament it is not a recognition of the magnitude of the service, it is not remuneration, it is not a recompense, it is not even a salary. It is just an allowance."
	That was to reflect the fact that people come from different walks of life and have different financial means. The allowance was intended to enable those with lesser means to perform functions in Parliament, but it was not a salary. I am a little concerned that we have slipped into using "salary" for parliamentary moneys that are transferred to Members when, in fact, they are not necessarily a salary.
	To make the debate a bit more exciting, I should say that £400, if translated into current-day average earnings, amounts to somewhere between—we can argue the figure—£140,000 and £250,000. That is the context in which the issue ought to be considered. I am not arguing for that amount, so please let nobody assume that I am.  [ Interruption. ] I notice that some people are nodding, saying "No, do argue for it", but I am not going to do so. I merely observe that those moneys are not necessarily a salary, and that there may be a simpler way to tackle the issue. I hope that the Kelly review will consider that.
	I am very much in favour of simplicity, but I am concerned that the Bill adds another layer of complexity. We are in danger of repeating mistakes, by just adding more bodies, by not tackling the underlying issue and by creating a system that is as ugly as that which we are attempting to replace. The Bill is too hasty and knee-jerk; we need a better debate about the role of an MP and what they should be paid for. Some direct input by people into the review would be very helpful. The Bill is either too narrow or too broad—but it has certainly come too soon and without proper consideration.

Mark Field: It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman). One of the most depressing things that has happened to me in recent weeks was learning that he is standing down from Parliament. It was depressing not just because I am losing a friend—we entered this place on the same day some eight years ago—but because when he outlined his reasons for leaving, I found I agreed with about 90 per cent. of them. He has said exactly what I hope many of the more thoughtful Members would agree with.
	I also associate myself with every word of the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie), who, as ever, was able to articulate the arguments much more concisely than perhaps I am able to. However, I want to say briefly that I share the almost universal reservations about the speed with which the legislation is being rushed through. As a number of Members have said, it is being rushed through partly out of panic, and partly out of a desire to be seen to be doing something. Rushing legislation, particularly—dare I say it?—to go through all stages in three days, is a great mistake. We need to move towards greater separation of powers, especially between the Executive and the legislature, and the Bill regrettably takes us in diametrically the opposite direction.
	We risk politicising the judiciary, who will now stand in judgment on issues of parliamentary process and procedure, especially if clause 10 in its entirety comes into play. We risk vexatious litigation, perhaps driven by partisan political considerations. No doubt some publicity-hungry judges will also look to flex their muscles, to the edge of the legislation and probably beyond. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) rightly said, we are sent to this place by our constituents, not as bureaucratic placemen and women but as people who should be able to debate the important issues of the day.
	Without wishing to harp on too much about how we got into this situation, it is very important to put one or two things on the record. The Executive were repeatedly warned that the second home allowance was a disaster waiting to happen. I know that, because I have repeatedly warned over many years—it may be easy for me to be dispassionate as a central London Member whose salary has been kept down—about the grandstanding that went on by both Government and Opposition leadership on this matter. It goes back, I accept, to the 1980s, but three times during the eight years I have been a Member—it also happened in January 2008 over the London allowance—headline salaries have been kept down in spite of the independent Senior Salaries Review Body's recommendations, and then a blind eye was turned to the constant increase in the second home allowance, which was never reduced, reversed or even capped.
	In July 2001, there was a huge uplift outside any recommendation from any independent body so there was no longer, in my view, any real pretence that the second home allowance was reimbursement; rather, it was being used as a salary substitute because the Executive failed to have the courage to stand up and make the case for a higher salary going forward. Therein, a culture of absolute cynicism built up.
	The general public, in my view, understand the need for MPs living beyond commuting distance to have a home in London. Their view of a second home, however, is a rented, furnished flat, meaning that there is no need for household goods, plasma TV screens, gardening and cleaning bills, and no mortgages, no flipping, and no remortgaging or maximising of financial benefit. The capital gains scam and the appalling ongoing scam of section 292 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, which makes all this tax-free, is little short of disgrace. I suppose that, as in any banana republic, it is the MPs who end up making the law. This issue was not new; it was warned about, and I am not the only Member to have warned about it in these terms and for some years before the balloon went up.
	Let me touch briefly on clause 5 and second job scrutiny. I fear that it is the worst sort of cynicism and rank hypocrisy for the Prime Minister to attempt to embarrass Conservative MPs by conflating the second jobs issue with the allowance scandal, which has ended in the disaster that my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe pointed out. There has never been any suggestion that outside employment was undesirable or that it interfered with MPs' duties, nor any sense in which it has been part of the scandal that has engulfed Parliament in recent weeks. Indeed, in my view the real risk is now that MPs will become ever more of a separate political caste—professionals moving to politics perhaps from their 20s onwards. It may suit the Executive and any future Executive for Parliament to become a cadre of super-councillors retreating from independent-minded views into a constituency-based comfort zone. That, I think, would be absolutely catastrophic for public life, but it is what this Bill will help to reinforce.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) rightly alerted us to the ludicrous anomaly whereby Ministers, already remunerated out of public funds, are exempted from filling in the same timesheets that each and every one of us who has an outside interest will have to fill in. Yet their extra-curricular activities equally impinge on their ordinary duties as Members of Parliament and as legislators. Indeed, it is compensation for that time forgone that is the very reason why Ministers are paid.
	We need to move, as I think we are—slowly—towards the idea of a separation between the Executive and the legislature. I know that that means a big change in how the Executive will operate, but it seems to me that the role of the MP should be as a law- maker, as someone holding the Executive to account, which is particularly important—dare I say it?—for those MPs from the governing party as well as those from Opposition parties. For reasons that a number of my hon. Friends have pointed out, that tends to have been forgotten.
	I believe that this Bill is deeply flawed, not only in its underlying principles but in its practical application. The new external expenses regulatory body that is being created sounds superficially soothing, but experience should have taught the Government that it may well act in many ways to undermine the internal promotion of proper standards among parliamentarians. Instead, a "them and us" culture will be created; there will be systematic attempts to avoid the letter of the rule; and there will be hostility to the ethic of box ticking rather than an appreciation of the principles that should lie behind any code.
	We should be trying to inculcate a sense of right and wrong in parliamentarians in all their claims for allowances and expenses or, indeed, in any other way. The Bill, however, risks creating a "what we can get away with" culture that we have seen in the past. We have already seen what has been justified as being within the rules—ludicrously, there have been claims for £400 a month for food and £250 a month for petty cash with no questions asked—and that is the system from which we are moving away, but I fear that a body such as IPSA will simply reinforce it with a new set of rules. We need the ethics to come from individuals rather than resulting from a hostility which, inevitably, will be mounted against any new regulatory body.
	I am sorry that I have not had a chance to say more; indeed, we would all have liked to say a good deal more. However, I am glad to have had the chance to make a small contribution to the debate.

Dominic Grieve: The fact that the rules are linked to regulations on declarations of interest and what constitutes paid advocacy that are not in the Bill, and the fact that those rules are developing and changing, must give rise to the real possibility that Members of this House could be prosecuted for doing their jobs. That was one of the things that caused me anxiety when I came to look in detail at the Bill. The Government will argue—perfectly fairly, I am sure—that that is not their intention. However, the conflation of the draft, the offences section, the requirements on paid advocacy and the regulations that we will have as of 1 July—I have had to look at them for my own sake, as I am sure has every hon. Member—seems to make that a real possibility. So, yes, on that point my hon. Friend is right.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) outlined the extent to which the proposals as brought before the House do not reflect any of the discussions that have taken place and fly in the face of accepted practices as regards Members' conduct. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) highlighted from his long experience as Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights that if we are moving to a statutory system of regulation it must be ECHR compliant, yet what is proposed is plainly nothing of the kind. If that is maintained, we will land ourselves with considerable difficulties.
	The hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made a powerful and passionate speech, outlining what she thought being a Member of Parliament was all about, which I think is accepted across the House. She is right to be concerned about the proposals, because I fear that, even unintentionally, they will undermine her ability to do her job. My hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) also made a powerful speech about an MP's role.
	The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) highlighted the extent to which the Bill of Rights of 1689, which is often only cited in this place as some decorative extra, is in fact the rock and foundation on which freedom of speech in this country and in this House has been built, and the extent to which those rules will be changed by this Bill, which will be passed in three days by this House. The same points were made by the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory).
	The thing that shone through as the debate progressed was that, save for a half concession by the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), no one who participated in the debate was happy with the entirety of the Government's proposals, or with anything close to their entirety. My hon. Friends the Members for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) and for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) highlighted the fact that the legislation appears to have been embarked on in great haste and contains a series of objectives, some of which can be readily supported but others of which appear to be entirely unclear.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) made an eloquent speech about Parliament and what it is to be here. I can speak only for myself when I say that I came into this House with romantic notions about what it was to be a Member. Those notions survive, but over the past few weeks I have come close to despair and, at times, to following the example of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe—I wish I could talk him out of this—and just walking away from this place in despondency and sadness, because we are close to the point of no longer being able to do our work at all.
	To change direction, may I say to the Secretary of State how I think this issue ought to be approached? He is right when he says that there is an urgent issue to be considered. We have been exposed to unparalleled levels of public anger, hostility and disgust about this place. Those of us who have held public meetings—I have done so in my constituency—have had no difficulty in picking up on the extent of public dissatisfaction with the way in which we conduct our business, but I suggest to him that, as has been rightly highlighted in the debate, the issue goes further than salaries and expenses; it goes to our very relevance. The growing perception of our irrelevance is the foundation on which the current crisis has occurred, and we have failed to address that irrelevance for a long period. Whatever he may say, the public perceptions are that this place is powerless against the Executive and that it is supine. All people ever see of this place and all that is ever reported about it is the bear garden in this House—it is not the work that hon. Members do elsewhere, often in an atmosphere of far greater consensus and moderation—which tends towards exposing us to ridicule.
	The public then examine what we have been up to in respect of salaries and expenses. It was an urgent need that those things be dealt with outside this place, and I am delighted that the first part of the Bill provides for—or sets the scene for so doing—exactly that. There is a problem in that, without Sir Christopher Kelly having reported, many of the issues that should be of urgent importance to us are not yet covered. We must face up to the fact that the Byzantine system of allowances and what it allowed people to claim for has created some of the problems, and until it is sorted out we will not have reached our goal. This House can be comfortable with and happy about the fact that we will no longer be responsible for issues relating to our own remuneration, because that is not what we were sent here for—it is the additional extra to our work. We can be wholly content with that outcome.
	The other thing to have emerged from this crisis is that the transparency that we are now to have is probably the greatest moderator of all in ensuring that things do not go wrong in future. How much better it would have been if the claims that were exposed for criticism in the past two months had been posted the day on which they had been made and an MP could then have realised the public hostility to what he had been asking for, rather than our all facing the problem of having to justify, six years after the event, what many people were told at the time was justified. Transparency will take us a long way too.
	For those reasons, the Government's intentions and the first part of the Bill seem to us to be entirely necessary. We will support the Bill—or we will certainly not impede its passage—because we take the view that something must be done on those matters, but I must say to the Secretary of State that when one examines the second part of the Bill, one finds that the whole issue starts to become opaque. The Government have created—or they have certainly set about initially creating—a structure of regulation and punishment of MPs for transgressions that, if it had been given its full rein when first introduced, would in essence have turned us into the creatures of a quango. The Government drew back from that, but one is left with the impression that having put together a Bill that was constructed around the ex cathedra statements of the Prime Minister, without having previously having consulted anybody, they now feel obliged to pursue at least more than a fig leaf to show that he meant business. The reality, however, is that the Bill is fundamentally flawed in its approach to our regulation.
	The Bill would create criminal offences. I have nothing against criminalising Parliament. Indeed, the point was made to me at a public meeting that I attended that one reason for our unpopularity is that the public feel so dumped on and criminalised by a succession of over-zealous Governments over the years. They feel that we are being treated differently to them. However, that may be a good reason for Parliament's starting to decriminalise many of the things that we have imposed on the public, rather than starting to criminalise ourselves.
	If we are to be criminalised, it should be for some good reason that meets an objective. The first offence that we would create for ourselves would be one for which the general law already provides with far more draconian sanctions. How can we seriously tell our electors that we have a special fraud offence for MPs, punishable by only 12 months' imprisonment, but that they will get 10 years if they commit fraud? What is the purpose of that?
	Secondly, we will criminalise paid advocacy. I happen to think that paid advocacy is bribery. I thought that we were already criminalising bribery in a way that succeeded in taking into account the Bill of Rights and ensured that it would not be an obstacle to the conviction for bribery of a Member of Parliament. If so, what is the purpose of criminalising paid advocacy? It is a serious disciplinary offence against this House, and—as we have highlighted—the way in which the rules on outside interests and gifts are now drafted means that Members will be subject to severe anxiety about what constitutes paid advocacy and what does not. If any hon. Member wishes to understand that point, I suggest that they read the latest rules on what has to be declared after 1 July. The doubt about the difference between a gift and a benefit in kind shines through those regulations.
	The entirety of the enforcement powers that the Bill would bestow raises serious issues of justiciability. If the House wishes to engage in the merry-go-round of litigation, we can embark on that cheerfully, but it is unclear whether the rules could be enforced by the courts. My opinion is that they would be capable of being enforced by the courts. Indeed, hon. Members may derive some comfort from the fact that they would be able to challenge the rulings by the new Commissioner of IPSA in the courts if they disagreed with them.
	Some of those results may be inevitable, but I do not think that all of them are. I am convinced—I hope that the Secretary of State will be open-minded in Committee—that we can achieve the objectives that we all share without creating some of the difficulties that have been highlighted by the memorandum by the Clerk of the House and by virtually every hon. Member who has spoken.
	This debate is not about arcane issues—I do not really like talking about parliamentary privilege. It is about whether we can do our job. It is about whether we have the self-confidence to maintain our standards and to act corporately in challenging the Executive and holding them to account, which is one of our primary purposes. If that is undermined, we will be back in our constituencies in 12 months being criticised for something else and with the knowledge that our role is becoming more and more irrelevant. I ask the Secretary of State to have the courage to stand up for high standards, for the protection of the freedoms that we were sent here to protect, and to ensure that not only we but those who follow us have a framework within which to do that.
	If the Secretary of State and the Government listen, we can all break up for the recess at the end of July knowing that we have put on the statute book the first building block, and have taken a step in the right direction. However, if we are simply obliged to sign up to the Bill because if we do not we will all be condemned to the outer darkness for failing to appreciate public anger and respond to it, we will do ourselves and everybody else a grave disservice.

Barbara Keeley: Indeed, but Congress has more regular elections than we do, so it is easier for Congress to decide the matter when an election is due fairly soon.
	The hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) re-organised his diary to be present, and he made a wide ranging contribution on the role of an MP. Many other Members spoke about the role of an MP. I disagree with the point that being an MP is not a full-time job, and that an MP's pay is not a salary. The hon. Gentleman and I—

Michael Clapham: I am grateful to have secured this debate, because it is on an important and complex issue, and I believe that there is a common-sense way to deal with it. I am also pleased to see the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw) in his place, because he has some knowledge about asbestos in relation to social housing, which is what the debate is about.
	The debate centres on a report that was recently compiled for the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians by two ladies, Linda Waldman and Heather Williams, who have brought to the attention of UCATT a number of important issues. I want to talk about three of them tonight. First, I want to draw to the Minister's attention the size of the problem. Secondly, I want to refer to the research in the paper, because it relates to a great deal of the current research and gives us an opportunity to consider the recommendations that have been made. Thirdly, I want to suggest to the Minister that he might think about taking some of the recommendations on board, as they would bring about the changes required without a prohibitive capital outlay.
	The Minister will be aware that asbestos causes a range of diseases: asbestosis, pleural plaques, pleural thickening, lung cancer and mesothelioma. The latter two diseases are unrelated to dosage, and it is thought that just a small exposure can lead to mesothelioma. I want to bring his attention to a study done by the British Lung Foundation in January last year, which set out to explore how wide people's knowledge of the dangers of asbestos was. It commissioned a survey of 399 tradespeople in January 2008, and the respondents were made up of plumbers, builders, carpenters, electricians, joiners and gas fitters of varying ages. The results showed that a third of tradespeople admitted to not being well informed about asbestos, and three in 10 incorrectly believed that asbestos had now been removed from all UK buildings. There is great ignorance about asbestos. Last year, there were more than 2,000 mesothelioma deaths in the UK, which has led some to suggest that the UK has a mesothelioma epidemic.
	The TUC argues that there are at least twice as many deaths from lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos as there are mesothelioma deaths. Therefore, perhaps 6,000 to 8,000 deaths per year are caused by exposure to asbestos.